1066 and all that – you’ve probably heard the phrase but how much do you remember about it?

It means that on October 14, 2016, we’ve reached the 950th anniversary of one of the most important dates in our history, the Battle of Hastings.

If all those Year 7 history lessons are murky by now, the basic lowdown is that it was when raiders from northern French invaded England and won. Their descendants stayed and settled and might even be your ancestors.

Wasn’t that when someone got an arrow in the eye?

According to legend, the English king Harold Godwinson (the last of our Anglo-Saxon kings) was killed when an arrow pierced his eyeball.

Who won?

After the victory, his friends called him Wlliam the Great – but enemies called him William the Bastard, as he was born out of wedlock.

He is now known as William the Conqueror for self-explanatory reasons, but people didn’t start using this term until 200 years after the battle.

Technically, he was not French but Norman. The Normans were originally ‘north men’ – vikings from Scandinavia who raided the continent, some of them settling in northern France and establishing Normandy.

The Normans, winning the battle in a scene from the Bayeux Tapestry (Picture: Getty)

After the victory, on battlefields seven miles from Hastings in East Sussex on the south coast, the French-speaking Normans became the ruling class of England.

Many aristocrats owned land on both sides of the Channel.

Who was Harold Hardrada?

You might remember him from history class as well. Not to be confused with Harold II, Hardrada was a Viking warrior who led an army to invade British shores on the NORTH coast just before the battle of Hastings.

(Anglo Saxon) King Harold had just managed to beat him when he had to rush to the other side of the country and fight yet another army.

So his soldiers were tired before they even started the Battle of Hastings, as they had to march 250 miles south.

How did the Normans win?

The Anglo-Saxons had a good tactic of making a ‘shield wall’ – standing together with their shields held up like modern day riot police. The Normans couldn’t break through, even though they had around 7,000 troops compared to the opposition’s 6,000.

This meant the battle lasted a long longer than most of the era, going on most of the day.

The Normans attacking the English shield wall (Picture: Playmobil/Marc Morris)

But they managed to make headway by pretending to retreat.

Thinking they had the upper hand, some of the Anglo Saxons broke rank which allowed the Normans to attack.

What changed after they took control?

One of the biggest things was that the English language as we know it today began to evolve after the invasion.

Old English was more similar to German, but when French became the official court language the way people spoke became very different.

Obviously, we don’t speak French – but the two languages mingled. Without the invasion and imposition of the new language, Shakespeare would have written in very different tongue.

William The Conqueror reigned from 1066 until his death in 1087 (Picture: Getty)

What about the Domesday Book?

William ordered people to start work on the Domesday Book in 1085.

This was an attempt to make an inventory of his new kingdom, to find out the details of the land he now controlled (specifically, what its resources were and how much tax he could raise).

The largest survey of its kind in Europe, it is our earliest public record and is still used today as evidence of entitlement to land.

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Is this battle really important?

Yes, it is one of the defining moments of our history and without it, nothing would be the same today.